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Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Private Eye's lead story was on this blog in 2008

The lead story in the new Private Eye concerns hacks' attempts to turn up some dirt on our new prime minister.

They hoped to find it in a privately published history of the Oxford University Conservative Association that appeared in 1994 and left no episode of backstabbing or vote-rigging undocumented.

Trouble is, that history has suddenly become very scarce. Even college libraries known to have held copies now claim they do not.

But the Eye has seen one and can reveal that no wrongdoing by either the young Theresa Brasier or the young Philip May appears in it.

It does however have a story about Damian Green being thrown into the Cherwell.

One person who will perhaps be a little anxious at the news that David Davis has been replaced as shadow Home Secretary by Dominic Grieve is Conservative MP Damian Green, who has the immigration brief in Grieve's new department.

The two men were at Oxford together in the 1970s, when Green (educated at Reading grammar school) was an undergraduate at Balliol College and his new boss (educated at Westminster public school) was at Magdalen. Green, who a contemporary remembers as an earnest sort of chap, was invited to a black-tie dinner at Magdalen and polished his shoes accordingly, but after dinner - and, sadly, history does not record the reason for this - Green found himself picked up in a display of high spirits and deposited in the Cherwell by a group of Magdalen hearties, including Dominic Grieve.

Quoted, because was not a scoop by me either. The story had appeared in the Observer's diary column Pendennis.